DEAR CLIMATE is an ongoing creative-research project that was founded in 2012 by Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer and Marina Zurkow.

DEAR CLIMATE hacks the aesthetics of instructional signage and the techniques of meditation to lead viewers and listeners towards a better informed, more realistic, and more affectionate relationship to the more-than-human world, including geo-physical forces, and others species,

The posters can be printed from your computer, hung up in your workplace cafeteria or school lunchroom, sheet-mulched into your neighborhood carbon capturing food forest or slipped into the magazine rack at a freeway filling station.

The meditations could be used at weddings, picnics, concerts, sports events, raves and retreats, or you might enjoy them while lying in your bathtub (empty or full).

DEAR CLIMATE might find its way into an alleyway or a gallery, as a graffiti-walled midnight wheat-paste operation, or as a mysterious alien listening pod floating in a city park pond. It could be dropped from an airplane, or it might appear disguised as an outhouse adjacent to a museum gallery.

Our own preferences are for the surprising, abject, provocative, strange, lonely: A windswept street. A drift of papers, layers of peeling posters; headphones dangling from inside the janitor’s closet.

Currently active members of DEAR CLIMATE:

Marina Zurkow builds animations and participatory environments that focus on humans’ relationships with animals, plants and the weather. Recent exhibitions include bitforms gallery; the Montclair Art Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Museum for Women in the Arts; Borusan Collection, Istanbul; and the Sundance Film Festival. Zurkow is a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, and has been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and is represented by bitforms gallery.

Una Chaudhuri teaches English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University. Her recent books include The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance, Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (co-edited with Holly Hughes) and Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change (co-authored with Shonni Enelow). She is a founding member of the CLIMATE LENS theater collective.

Oliver Kellhammer is a Canadian land artist, permaculture teacher, activist and writer. His botanical interventions and public art projects demonstrate nature's surprising ability to recover from damage. Lately, his work has focused on cleaning up contaminated soils, reintroducing prehistoric trees onto landscapes damaged by industrial forestry and cataloging the biodiversity of brownfield ecologies. Recent writings include ‘Neo Eocene’ published in Making the Geologic Now, edited by Jamie Kruse and Elisabeth Ellsworth (Punctum 2012) and ‘Violent Reactions’ in Marina Zurkow’s Petroleum Manga (Punctum 2014). He divides his time between rural British Columbia and Alphabet City.